Research on the crime control industry
Prisonsucks.com is a clearinghouse for useful, verifiable statistics about the crime control industry. Too often prison activists use statistics that are out of date, provided without citation or simply wrong. One of these days the public will start listening to prison activists, so let's be prepared to win without being sidetracked by arguments over defective statistics. In some cases, the numbers we need don't exist. In others, the facts exist but activists don't know where to find them. Now you do.
October 2002
Prison Legal News
October 30, 2002
The article "Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in New York" in the October 2002 issue of Prison Legal News was an edited version of a report by the Prison Policy Initiative. The full report is available on that site: http://www.prisonpolicy.org/importing.
New Book: Invisible Punishment
October 20, 2002
Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment, edited by Marc Mauer and Meda Chesney-Lind, just published by The New Press, reveals how the two million imprisoned Americans and their families are being punished by factors well beyond incarceration. Leading scholars and advocates explore the far-reaching consequences of thirty years of "get tough" policies on prisoners, ex-felons, and families and communities. The contributions in Invisible Punishment define the boundaries of a new field of inquiry concerning the impact of American criminal justice policies.
Factsheets on prisoners and the census
October 2, 2002
Our sponsor, the Prison Policy Initiative, today released two new factsheets on prisoners and the census.
Detaining for Dollars Federal aid follows inner-city prisoners to rural town coffers, [PDF] and Diluting democracy: Census quirk fuels prison expansion, [PDF] are now avaialble. Feel free to download, make copies, and distribute.
Incarceration Clock
As of --:--:-- -.-. today, there are an estimated -,---,---, people in U.S. prisons and jails. Source.
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Electronic books:
- Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Prison Abolitionists, 1976
- Limits to Pain by Nils Christie, 1981
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Like the site? Love the book!
Written by the editor of this site and co-published with the Western
Prison Project, The Prison Index: Taking the Pulse of the Crime Control
Industry is the first index of statistics about our nation's criminal
justice system ever published. Containing 611 facts and 17 graphs and
charts, this 48-page volume presents, in black-and-white, the state of
crime control in America. Read more and order online.